Posts tagged “medium format”

Somehow I was gonna try to avoid sexual connotations here as per the usual straight-dude technology whatever … maybe I will nonetheless.

Anyhow, my colleague and friend Derek Liddington hired me to do some photography work for his art practice, and rented the studio at Gallery 44 and their delightful Hasselblad H3DII. It was some very challenging work, really enjoyable, and the experience of working with the digital medium format was very rewarding … and enlightening. Before I get to that, I just noticed Derek already posted the shots from this afternoon, so have a look at our endeavours:

Best to let his work speak for itself, tho there’s some very eloquent descriptions in the sidebar on the site.

The camera itself was a joy to work with; the image sharpness was superb, colour accuracy and dynamic range was amazing (although I’m proud to say my S5 Pro was just about on par with the H3DII in the this regard), very satisfying clunk to the shutter and everything functioned as and when it was supposed to.

That being said; I was suprised at how clumsy and clunky the interface was, both the buttons/dials and the onscreen menus. It felt like a standard had been created out of utility some twenty years ago and never updated or optimized. Menus were clustered together seemingly at random; ISO selection was followed by Mode (M, A) followed by “Browse” … white balance was hidden somewhere I never found, thankfully it could be adjusted from the LCD screen with nominal difficulty.

I realize that this was my first encounter with this interface, but honestly, for what the camera was worth, and a general sense of the section of business using it … I expected it’d be designed for a more optimized workflow.